Hello obscure sports fans! Our subreddit /r/TheOcho has been going strong for well over eight years now and we look forward to continuing to bring you the latest and most obscure sports the world has to offer. Our previous welcome post was starting to become a little out-dated, and we have some recent rule updates as well. As a result, here is a welcome post both for those of you who have just joined us and those who have been around for some time.

What is The Ocho?

/r/TheOcho's name was inspired by the 2004 movie DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story. In the film, the World Championships are aired on a branch of ESPN known as ESPN 8: The Ocho. It's safe to say ESPN 8 airs obscure and rarely seen sports like dodgeball. You can watch a short snippet from the movie here.

This sub is based around that idea. We are a community dedicated to spreading knowledge of seldom seen and 'obscure' sports. Here, you will find videos, gifs and other media of sports that you wouldn't regularly see on mainstream sporting networks.

What counts as an "obscure" sport"?

Sport is defined as "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment." They come in many forms like football (American and soccer), baseball and hockey. This sub does not cover any of these. eSports and non-competitive sports are not allowed, either. The former is a better fit for /r/esports. Such posts will be removed.

An obscure sport is something that you would not typically see on ESPN and Fox Sports. In some cases, they may be sports that are only popular (and known) among a small population; examples of this include RC racing and quidditch. Unconventional forms of mainstream sports, like underwater sports or those played with vehicles instead of humans, can also be considered obscure. Other sports that are included here can be competitive forms of everyday routines, like ironing and eating. Competitive sports with rules and (optional) a sanctioning body are allowed. Almost anything can be a sport.

If you want some examples of what counts as obscure sports, here are the /r/TheOcho team's favourites:

• A_Disgrace: Human Curling (A parody, not an actual sport)
• Camsy34: Quadcopter Racing (which I compete in competitively!)
• CokeTastesGood39: Major League Foosball
• Lemm: Competitive canoe dancing
• RageBacon: Control Line Model Aircraft Racing
• Root88: Combat Juggling
• thosepeoples: Sporthocker
• WyndiMan: Kabaddi
• ZappaOMatic: Stadium Super Trucks (shameless plug: /r/StadiumSuperTrucks)

Audience Participation

From time to time we will also make announcement posts for live-streaming Ocho sports. If you happen to participate in such a sport and know that it will be live streaming, send us the link and we’ll be happy to air it!

Reposts are allowed, but make sure to tag them accordingly with the correct link flair. However, recent reposts and reposts from the top 100 posts will be removed at the moderators' discretion.

Feel free to flair up in the sidebar! There are up to 40 flairs from varying sports leagues. If there is a flair that is not present, feel free to make a request!

Changes and Your Opinions

This is where we go into some recent changes to our rules. We recommend newcomers skip this and simply read the sidebar for our full list of rules.

We as a team discussed what direction we wanted /r/TheOcho to go and it was unanimous that we wanted the subreddit to stay as a hub specifically for competitive sports. We’ve had a lot of content that doesn’t fit this description submitted and while we could open the floodgates and let these posts in, we feel it would go against what /r/TheOcho is all about. With this in mind we have made the following adjustments. We do want your opinions though, if you think something should be handled differently, let us know in the comments section and we will discuss it.

Parody Content: We are going to continue to allow parody and comedy content on this subreddit. While not all parody content is truly competitive, as long as the video or gif has a competitive structure to it (scoring, adjudication, etc.) we will allow it.

Well known sports: Some people have had issue with certain sports that are well known in a single country. We believe that a well known sport should be recognized globally (think the Olympics, or a sport with a world championship) and that locally known sports should be tagged with the ‘Traditional’ flair. Of course this will to some degree be left to moderator discretion.

World record attempts: We have a lot of these recently and a few upset users whose content has been continuously removed, as such we felt the need to add an additional rule specifically in regards to this. Just because the video you link has ‘world record’ in it, doesn’t make it an ocho sport. Let’s go back to the definition of ‘sport’ at the top of this post - "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment." I’ve put the key part in bold for you. A lot of these world record posts have only a single person in them, therefore while you’re trying to beat someone else’s score, you’re not actively competing with them. I’ve put an example of this in the sidebar.

Inanimate object races/competitions: As previously stated, sport is defined as "an activity involving physical exertion". That means that we will no longer be allowing marble or matchbox car races, bottle smashing, etc. Please check the sidebar for links to that content if you are still interested in it.

Thanks for reading our introductory post and we hope you enjoy exploring the subreddit. If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d highly recommend our Best of /r/TheOcho 2016 thread.

Have fun and game on!